“I’m tired of playing this game. It doesn’t have anything to do with reality!” If you’ve ever felt that way about financial strategy games, you’ve never played any of Blue Chip Software’s simulations. Each new program reflects more and more sophisticated investment mechanisms. SQUIRE is another step up from MILLIONAIRE and its fascinating cousins, TYCOON and BARON.
However, where MILLIONAIRE only allowed investments in the stock market, TYCOON only allowed investments in commodities, and BARON only allowed investments in real estate, SQUIRE recognizes that the astute investor uses more than one medium of financial manipulation and needs a balance of investments to be successful. Therefore, SQUIRE uses a combination of the three former games and then some. In addition to common stocks, commodities, and real estate, the investor is now allowed to invest in bonds, collectibles, money market accounts, IRA’s, oil and gas exploration, and cattle feeding.
The latter three items are extremely significant from a tax shelter perspective and one of the important features of SQUIRE is the necessity of being sensitive to tax liability and how to reduce it.
Further, SQUIRE has a “reality mode” option which allows “player-investors to input their actual investments, income needs, and interim goals in order to test their financial planning against several of SQUIRE’s market environments. Once again, Blue Chip has given us a tutorial, as well as a game. Friends of the other Blue Chip family simulations will be comfortable with the format of SQUIRE. It features the same basic sequence of general graph (of the economy), Financial News summary, price change summary, historical graphs, and command mode. It has added a retirement status bar graph to aid the player’s evaluation of his/her investment strategy’s performance. There is also an improvement in the game mechanics. It appears that the Financial News, while still important, is not as easily interpreted or functional as in MILLIONAIRE or TYCOON.
This was the only flaw in TYCOON, since an astute player could tell exactly what was going to happen from the concentrated bits and pieces of the news. Instead of giving the player more “red herrings” to choose from Zuber has chosen to give the player less overt indicators. This adds rather than subtracts from the realism.
Those who enjoy playing BARON and are amused by the unexpected events, which make one both chuckle and groan at the same time, will be pleased to note that they are also in SQUIRE. After all, one can’t foresee every emergency in planning for one’s financial future, can one? The strategies which may be found useful in the other simulations are workable in SQUIRE, but one must also keep a wary eye on the tax liability. It is possible to make sound investments in SQUIRE and still lose money, due to the tax burden. One should be particularly aware of the tax advantages of cattle feeding and oil and gas exploration before playing the game. The tax information alone is eye-opening enough to make playing the simulation worthwhile.
SQUIRE is an excellent simulation within a series of excellent simulations. As a game, it is slower moving than TYCOON and MILLIONAIRE, but faster paced than BARON. It still suffers from the solitaire nature of the game, but is as much a learning experience as a game. Those who have enjoyed the other titles in this series will enjoy SQUIRE.
Eliminator
Drone
Destructor
